This section is intended to provide a background or context to various embodiments recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Mobile multicast and broadcast systems have recently been standardized by different organizations, such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS), the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Technical Module Convergence of Broadcast and Mobile Services (TM-CBMS), and the OMA BCAST organizations. Other multicast and broadcast systems further include Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting—Terrestrial (ISDB-T), Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial/Handheld (DMB-T/H), Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB), Forward Link Only (FLO) and proprietary systems, such as for example, MediaFLO. Two primary services provided by such multicast/broadcast solutions are streaming and file delivery services.
OMA BCAST refers to an open global standard for mobile services, such as mobile TV and on-demand video services. Such services may be adapted to mobile Internet Protocol (IP)-based content delivery and peer-to-peer content delivery. For example, OMA BCAST supports broadcast technologies such as DVB-Handheld (DVB-H). 3GPP MBMS, and mobile unicast streaming systems. The OMA BCAST standard defines various features including, e.g., electronic service guide, file delivery, streaming content delivery, service and content protection, service provisioning, notifications, etc.
DVB IP Datacast (IPDC) and OMA BCAST define a service guide that carries a description of a service at issue. The IPDC ESG defines, in the Acquisition Fragment, the semantics of component characteristics. A receiving terminal can detect the characteristics of the service and decide whether it can consume the service or not. OMA BCAST has defined a bearer agnostic electronic service guide to be transmitted above different physical bearers.
Electronic service guides enable a terminal to communicate available services to end users (receivers) and to indicate how such services may be accessed. Electronic service guides serve to provide users with information regarding a variety of scheduled programs, allowing a user to navigate, select, and discover content by time, title, channel, genre, etc.
Electronic service guide fragments are independently-existing pieces of the electronic service guide. Electronic service guide fragments can comprise XML documents, Session Description Protocol (SDP) descriptions, textual files, images and other items. Electronic service guide fragments describe one or several aspects of currently available services, future services or broadcast programs. Such aspects may include, for example, free text descriptions, schedules, geographical availability information, prices, purchase methods, genres, and supplementary information such as preview images or clips. Audio, video and other types of data comprising the electronic service guide fragments may be transmitted through a variety of types of networks according to many different protocols. For example, data can be transmitted through the Internet using protocols of the Internet protocol suite, such as Internet Protocol (IP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Data is often transmitted through the Internet addressed to a single user. The data can, however, be multicast (to a set of users) or broadcast to all users in an area.
In an electronic service guide, information is typically presented to a user in terms of time. For example, as individual audio or video programs are scheduled to be presented during specified time periods, the electronic service guide concerning this information can be organized according to these same time periods, such that information about programs that are about to begin will be presented before programs occurring several hours in the future.
CMMB is a mobile TV and multimedia standard developed and specified by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) of China, which has been characterized as being similar to the DVB-Satellite services to Handhelds (DVB-SH) standard for satellite and terrestrial broadcasting of digital video. CMMB has specified an application layer agnostic data link layer and physical layer for the transmission of services such as mobile TV. However, utilizing OMA BCAST “on top” of CMMB in order to provide a complete end-to-end system, would result in a lack of mapping between the services signaled within the OMA BCAST ESG and the location of services signaled according to the CMMB specification.